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Lindsay Perigo

The Free Radical Online - Perigo vs. Nola

Six: Perigo Responds

I did not "wheel out" David Kelley as a "big gun"
to
continue some sort of "campaign." When discussing other
matters with me in the US recently, David volunteered that
he disagreed with some of my responses to Dr Nola, while
also, of course, disagreeing with him substantially. I
suggested to David that he "put it in writing for TFR"
and
he did. Simple & uncalculating as that!

David Kelley is much more lenient towards modern "logic"
than I. From the above it would appear that he would allow the validity
of a "correct" procedure using false premises, e.g. my
syllogism Robert Nola is a dog; all dogs are subjectivist philosophy
professors; therefore Robert Nola is a subjectivist philosophy professor
on the grounds that all of this would be true if indeed Robert Nola
were a dog & dogs were subjectivist philosophy professors. "Standard
logic" this may be; Objectivism, I submit, it ain't. It's a
mere imitation of logical procedure, which procedure can only be
conceptualised into an abstract formula by reference to facts
of reality  Robert Nola is a human being (fact); all human
beings are mortal (fact); Robert Nola is mortal (true conclusion).
It is meaningless to talk about syllogisms containing nonsense being
true statements about "metaphysical potentiality," since
nonsense has no metaphysical status & therefore no metaphysical
potential. David's gravity/pen analogy doesn't hold up. Gravity
does indeed have the potential to cause the pen to fall whether
the pen is dropped or not; that's inherent in the actual nature
of gravity & the pen. And the pen does have the actual potential
to be dropped; that's inherent in the actual nature of the pen &
the person holding it. Nothing in the universe, however, can transform
Nola from a human being into a dog. There is no such "metaphysical
potentiality" ("metaphysics" pertaining to the nature
of the universe); A is A. The potential of the pen to fall (real)
cannot be equated with the "potential" of Nola to become
a dog (unreal), nor can a syllogism fabricating the latter be granted
equal validity with one accurately identifying the former. David
is making a lethal concession here to Nola's ( & whoever else's)
impossible "possible worlds"  and, I submit, negating
the content of his last two paragraphs in the process!

What, as a matter of interest (albeit not to Dr Nola!) would Ayn
Rand have said? I quote from Leonard Peikoff's Objectivism: The
Philosophy of Ayn Rand, written on the basis of the lectures
Peikoff delivered in 1976 when Rand was looking over his shoulder:
"Logic is a volitional consciousness' method of conforming
to reality. It is the method of reason. ...If I declare, 'Apples
are razors & oranges are blades; therefore, one can shave with
a fruit salad,' this is not a process of cognition at all; it is
merely an imitation of the form of logic while dropping
its essence. If logic is to be the means of objectivity, a logical
conclusion must be derived from reality; it must be warranted by
antecedent knowledge, which itself may rest on earlier knowledge,
& so on back until one reaches the self-evident, the data of
sense [the mysterious 'grounding,' Dr Nola!]." I quote from
Rand herself, when she observes (Marginalia on John Hospers'
Introduction To Philosophical Analysis): "[Modern] philosophy
is concerned with a game of words & rules, unrelated to reality.
The joke is on the modern philosophers; by the above premises, modern
philosophers are pure Platonic rationalists, they make conclusions
without any reference to empirical reality ..." Ponder, too,
her endorsement (Marginalia again) of the following from
John Herman Randall's Aristotle: "A logic that had literally
no relevance to ontology, to what there is, would be about as meaningless
an enterprise as the wit of man could devise."

Nola continues to argue that logical formulae can be
manufactured out of the non-existent, that their truth is
self-contained within some rationalistic castle in the air
that need never have been raised up from or brought down to
earth (reality). If objectivity is indeed conformity to
reality, I am puzzled, then, as to why Robert objected to my
calling him a subjectivist in the first place, & by what standard
he claims to be "objective." (If he has an alternative
meaning
for "objective," perhaps he would care to share it? Or
perhaps,
true to the modern analyst/positivist flea-focus, he might say
everything hinges on the meaning of the word "to"?) But
then,
I shouldn't be puzzled  I should not expect Nola, as a
self-confessed devotee of "logics with contradictions in them"
& "worlds with no things in them" & fuzzy intuitions,
to display
anything consistently except inconsistency.

Let it be said that from my point of view this was never
intended as just "a debate on logic"  only Nola's complete
subjectivist dissembling when he entered the field of ethics
(TFR 32), & his subsequent (understandable!) refusal to re-enter
it, reduced it to such. In that brief, disastrous foray Nola
provided an eloquent illustration of the connection between
"True, false, what the hell, take your pick!" in epistemology
&
"Right, wrong, what the hell, take your pick!" in ethics.
This,
let it be remembered, was my beef with modern philosophy to
begin with (TFR 30). This also, dear reader, is why such a
seemingly absurdly abstruse debate matters.